AG: Well, I am at a million. Well the nuclear industry is obviously throwing barbs at my number, but they are claiming that maybe a hundred people will die from the accident.

HC: Oh, that is ridiculous.

AG: But I used Steve Wing’s data from Three Mile Island. And he shows pretty clearly that 10,000 people died of cancer from Three Mile Island. And of course we know a million at Chernobyl. So it seems to me, based on the fact that we had larger releases after Fukushima in a higher population zone, that a million people is certainly credible. The difference around Chernobyl, is that on one side of Fukushima you have water, whereas at Chernobyl there was land all the way around. But the industry knows that there will be . . . Japan has got a population of 140 million. And about a third die of cancer. So you are looking at roughly 40 or 50 million over that time period will normally die of cancer. So if I am right and there are a million people, that is only a 2% increase. And so it will be extraordinarily hard to measure if you are not looking for it.

HC: But they will be doing epidemiological studies and I think that you are underestimating that number because do you still stand by your data that 2.5 to 3 times more radiation escaped from Fukushima than Chernobyl?

AG: I am certain of that for the nobel gasses.

HC: Yes.

AG: With the xenon and krypton, there is measured data in the northwest quadrant for the first week of the accident, where every cubic meter, 3 feet by 3 feet by 3 feet, of air was a thousand becquerels, a thousand disintegrations per second for every cubic meter up that way. Now that has got to be causing lung cancers and whole body exposures that the industry is not willing to address. The other thing is that they found that apparently on March 16th, Unit II had an internal explosion. It looks fine if you look at Unit II from the outside. It does not look bad at all. But it cracked the containment at the same time the operators had all of the vents open in the nuclear reactor. And a huge cloud of radiation was released on the 16th and the wind was blowing toward Tokyo. Now there is not a lot of radiation monitors that early in the accident. You know there is chaos within Japan and Tokyo Electric, and yet no one is really willing to say, oh my god, what was the exposure in Tokyo on March 15th, 16th 17th? There is not a lot of good data and what that data there is, the Japanese are consistently downplaying. They are underestimating the exposure. But you know, I was in Tokyo back in February, and I found on the ground, 7,000 disintegrations per second in every kilogram of soil. That would qualify as radioactive waste in the States. And the Japanese government is saying, don’t worry be happy. Business as usual.
[…]

AG: I am most concerned about uranium. We are finding uranium in samples which indicates fuel melt and stuff like that and as a heavy element, we are surprised to be able to pick it up a couple of hundred miles away. One of the samples I took in Tokyo had uranium in it. So that is just an indication of a gross core breech and things like that. So we are finding some data out of Europe that talks about dust in homes and the homes are 100 miles away. And we are looking at per kilogram so for 2.2 pounds, 100,000 disintegrations per second in a kilogram of dust. Now that is a lot of dust. But the Japanese sleep on the floor.

HC: Ummm . . .

AG: So people 100 miles out are sleeping in a radioactive dust that is going to be causing either lung ingestion or mouth ingestion, etc. So they are not out of the woods and so I think you were getting to the point a minute ago that we have got a government that does not want to admit, and a medical community that will march in lockstep with the government unfortunately. I think they have forgotten the hippocratic oath. But they are in a lot of cases, refusing to say that these illnesses are radiation induced.

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The artwork in the header, titled "JAPAN:Nuclear Power Plant," is copyright artist Tomiyama Taeko.

The photograph in the sidebar, of a nuclear power plant in Byron, Illinois, is copyright photographer Joseph Pobereskin (http://pobereskin.com/)

This website was designed by the Center for East Asian Studies, the University of Chicago, and is administered by Masaki Matsumoto, Graduate Student in the Masters of Arts Program for the Social Sciences, the University of Chicago.

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